WASHINGTON – It was a Friday night when Hunter Biden arrived at his parents’ Delaware home for what he had been told would be a family dinner. But as soon as the drug-addicted son of future President Joe Biden walked through the door, he realized the family was planning an intervention, not a meal.
Amid the tears, yelling and accusations of betrayal that followed, a visibly terrified Joe Biden turned to his son and pleaded. “I don’t know what else to do,” he cried out. “I’m so scared. Tell me what to do.”
Anna LaBarre knows that feeling of helplessness. She, too, has watched as an adult child with a brilliant future teetered close to self-destruction under the demons of addiction. On her work break, LaBarre used to get in her car, drive through the streets and alleys of Columbus, Ohio, and search for her daughter. She had no plans to approach the young woman should she actually find her. She just wanted to know she was alive.
“I don’t understand,” she’d often tell her daughter in a cry that eerily echoed Joe Biden’s words to his son. “Help me understand. I can’t help you.”
Hunter Biden’s battle with substance use is back in the spotlight as the White House prepares for the possibility that the president’s youngest son could face criminal charges. Federal prosecutors are reportedly nearing a decision on whether to charge Hunter Biden with tax crimes and with making a false statement about a gun purchase.
No one can say with certainty the toll that Hunter Biden’s addiction has exacted on the president and his family. Every case of addiction is different. Every family is affected in different ways.
But while for most Americans addiction is a private family affair, many choose to keep a child’s or sibling’s substance abuse – and the criminal behavior that often accompanies it – a secret from even their most intimate friends. Hunter Biden’s struggles have played out in public and in the political sphere inhabited by his father. Further complicating matters: Republicans have repeatedly sought to use the federal investigation into Hunter Biden’s private affairs, and at times even his drug addiction, as part of their campaign to portray the Biden family as corrupt.
Perhaps more than anyone else, families whose lives have been wrecked by the disease of addiction understand what the Bidens have endured as Hunter Biden fought through recovery. No one can know what it’s like to have a child or sibling face down addiction until you’ve gone through it yourself, they say. Addiction traumatizes not only the person suffering from dependency. It terrorizes the entire family.
“It was horrible,” said John Koch of Chicago, who got a protective order to keep his son, John Alexander Koch, away from the rest of the family when the son was deep in the throes of substance abuse. “I would not wish it upon anybody.”
Families who’ve lived through the trauma of addiction find it appalling that anyone’s substance abuse issues would be turned into a political weapon, regardless of party affiliation. Hunter Biden’s experiences show that addiction still carries a devastating stigma despite advances in the treatment and public perception of the disease.
“There’s really no one who is immune to this,” said Alexis Pleus of Windsor, New York, whose son, Jeff Dugon, died of an accidental heroin overdose. “It doesn’t matter – race, class, gender, what your income is, in the public eye, out of the public eye. Anyone can be affected. No one should be judged for this. Absolutely no one.”
Not even the president’s son.
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‘You gotta get some help’
Joe Biden, who has made overdose and addiction issues a priority for his administration, rarely speaks publicly about his son’s substance abuse. The White House declined to comment for this article.
On the few occasions when the president has spoken about his son’s addiction, it has usually been to vigorously defend him against partisan attacks.
When Donald Trump invoked Hunter Biden’s drug abuse during a presidential debate in 2020, Joe Biden came to his son’s defense. “My son – like a lot of people, like a lot of people you know at home – had a drug problem,” Biden said. “He’s overtaken it, he’s fixed it, he’s worked on it. And I’m proud of him.”
In an interview with CBS News on Feb. 5, 2021, an emotional Biden again praised his son for writing honestly about his addiction in his memoir, “Beautiful Things.“
“I’ll bet you there’s not a family you know that didn’t have somebody in the family who had a drug problem, or an alcohol problem,” the president said. “And he’s gone through hell.”
Reading the memoir gave him hope, Biden said. “I mean, it was like my boy’s back,” he said, his voice breaking.
Hunter Biden has spoken candidly and written extensively about his battle with substance abuse. In his 2021 memoir, he recounted times when he would smoke crack cocaine every 15 minutes, the two weeks he spent thousands of dollars on drugs, and the 2019 intervention that ended with his father chasing him around outside the family home in Wilmington, Delaware.
He recalled how his father’s enemies exploited his demons and addictions for political gain.
“Where’s Hunter?” was a frequent refrain among Republicans during the 2020 presidential contest. Trump’s campaign made up T-shirts bearing the phrase and sold them for $25 a pop, in sizes ranging from small to XXXL.
Last fall, a private voice message that Joe Biden left to his son on Oct. 15, 2018, was leaked and aired by Fox News host Sean Hannity, ostensibly to provide insight into Hunter Biden’s state of mind when he filled out the gun application under investigation by authorities.
Joe Biden’s message to his son on that voicemail: “It’s Dad. I called to tell you I love you. I love you more than the whole world, pal. You gotta get some help. I know you don’t know what to do. I don’t either.”
Brandon Swinehart, who lived on the streets of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district for two years when he was heavily using drugs, can’t understand how a father’s message of love and support to a son who is battling addiction could end up being a political issue. Using Hunter Biden’s addiction to score political points is “probably the most despicable thing I’ve seen in my life,” he said.
“If some Republican’s child had these issues and a Democrat did the same thing, I’d say the same thing,” said Swinehart, who has been sober for 18 years and now runs a screen-printing business in Cincinnati, Ohio. “This has nothing to do with competency or being president. This is someone’s family. It’s a family affair. Please stay out of it.”
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‘Why did they choose drugs over me?’
Gracie Parker never knew her mother. A heavy drug user, the young mom overdosed and was found dead at the bottom of a river six months after Gracie was born. Her father, who also suffers from a substance use disorder, has spent much of his life in and out of jail and rehab and has had next to no involvement in Gracie’s life.
“Why did they choose drugs over me?” Gracie often wonders of her mom and dad.
At age 10, she has become an advocate for other children dealing with trauma and has spoken at events across North Carolina and in Washington. Her grandparents, James Parker and Elke Kennedy of Franklin, North Carolina, have custody of her and are raising her.
Addiction “changes your whole life,” said James Parker, whose son is Gracie’s father.
Gracie’s father has no idea what she goes through, “and that makes me mad,” James Parker said. “Why should my daughter have to stand up and talk about mental health for children at 10 years old?”
Other families tell similar stories of how a son’s or daughter’s addiction has destroyed marriages, of how an in-law’s drug use has sowed lasting distrust and caused financial ruin, of how the trauma of a brother’s or sister’s behavior has lingered long after they’ve gone into recovery – if they were lucky enough to survive.
“I impacted my family and those who cared about me in so many different ways,” said Amy Molinski of Waterford, Wisconsin, who started using cocaine at age 17 and eventually gravitated toward heroin and oxycontin.
Molinski has been clean for 13 years and works as a peer support counselor at a drug addiction treatment center, but her mother was recently diagnosed with PTSD.
“Everything scares her,” Molinski said. “Everything startles her, and she may jump or yell or scream. And it really traces back to my addiction and the amount of trauma that caused her.”
Molinski’s sister-in-law, Annie Molinski of Burlington, Wisconsin, recalled the years when Amy was using drugs as “a deep and dark, devastating time” for the family. Amy Molinski was smart, crafty and deceptive, “a master manipulator” who would steal anything of value to support her habit, including money that her brother and future sister-in-law had saved for their wedding. One time, she even pawned her mother’s wedding ring for a fix.
“At a certain point, we were just in survival mode,” said Annie Molinski, who recalls staying at her in-laws’ home, reaching into the bathroom cabinet drawer for her toothbrush and accidentally grabbing hold of a heroin needle instead.
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‘So awful, you almost wish it was over’
John Alexander Koch of Phoenix, who was incarcerated 26 times and placed in treatment 22 times during his battle with heroin and opioid use, remembers his mother getting down on her hands and knees in prayer position and begging him not to leave their home because she knew he was going to buy drugs.
“‘I love you – I will do everything in my power to get you help, please don’t go and use these drugs that are going to kill you,’” he recalls her pleading. All he could think of “was not that my mother is crying in front of me or that I’ve hurt her so bad,” he said. “It was that I hope my ride gets here soon enough so that I can take this $40 I have and feel better.”
Another time, Koch overdosed on fentanyl-laced heroin in the basement of the family home after Thanksgiving Dinner. A friend who supplied the drugs and was with Koch called 911. Unaware of the life-and-death drama unfolding just feet from them, his parents were relaxing upstairs on the couch.
“They got a knock on the door,” said Koch, who has been in recovery for a decade and is now part of the senior leadership at Community Medical Services, a treatment program that helped change his life. “It was the ambulance, and they said you need to let us in right now. Someone’s dying in your basement.”
His father followed the EMTs downstairs and watched as they injected his son with Narcan, which reverses opioid overdoses. Their quick action saved his son’s life. But the horror of that ordeal turned the father into an advocate for making access to the drug more widely available – something that also has been a goal of the Biden administration.
“When it gets so bad, it’s so awful, you almost wish it was over,” the father said. “Because you just don’t know how much more you’re able to take.”
For years, LaBarre’s daughter, Jessie Jennings of Columbus, Ohio, looked back on her addiction and the toll it took on her family with a sense of shame.
Shame eventually turned to guilt, which enabled to her to start making amends to those she loved – for stealing money, jewelry, property, anything of value to support her habit, for selling the gift cards her parents gave her to purchase groceries and then using the money for drugs, for calling on her parents to pay her overdue rent so she wouldn’t get evicted and turned out onto the streets.
Swinehart, who grew up in a wealthy Cincinnati suburb, overdosed 20 times and spent 13 months in prison when he was hooked on heroin and other drugs. He would often go months at a time without any contact with his parents or other loved ones. During those prolonged periods, his father would call the morgue to see if he had died.
“They loved it when I was in jail,” he said. “Because they knew where I was, that I was safe.”
After her son’s death from an overdose, Pleus started Truth Pharm, a nonprofit organization that works to educate people on harm reduction strategies and serves as a voice for those struggling with substance abuse.
Pleus applauds Hunter Biden for being open about his struggles. The scrutiny and criticism the Bidens and others in the public eye face can be crushing. But, Pleus said, their openness is helping to shed some of the stigma of addiction.
“It’s really important to get the message out to people that they shouldn’t struggle alone and that they shouldn’t struggle in shame and silence,” she said. “We have to break the stigma by talking about this more. That’s how we’re going to solve the problem.”
Michael Collins covers the White House. Follow him on Twitter @mcollinsNEWS.
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